HES-SO
Beneficiary

The University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland is the largest HES in Switzerland. It is recognized for the quality of its applied research and it offers undergraduate and graduate degrees to its more than 20’000 students in a wide range of engineering and economics majors including Engineering, Design, Management, Social Studies, Nursing and Music. With its 28 schools of higher education, the HES-SO plays a preeminent role in the socio-economic and cultural development of the seven cantons of Western Switzerland and is a recognized player within the Swiss and international landscape of higher education and research.

The activities of the Institute for Information and Communication Technologies IICT cover a wide range of areas, including Low Power Consumption Communication Circuits, Big Data, Computer Networks, Lightning, Electromagnetic Compatibility, Telecommunications, and Network Security. In the area of lightning, the research has led to important contributions in collaboration with other European and overseas partners and in close cooperation with the EMC lab of the EPFL. Salient theoretical and experimental contributions are the first ever measurements and characterization of lightning leader/return stroke electric fields at 30 m and 500 m from artificially initiated lightning, the first ever measurements of the horizontal electric field from distant lightning, and the development of the Cooray‐Rubinstein formula, in collaboration with the University of Uppsala, which is widely used in research and in electromagnetic coupling programs for the estimation of the horizontal component of the electric field from lightning return strokes.

The HES-SO team